Size isn't everything when talking mobile performance: The UK's largest cities suck at it

London has again finished towards the bottom of a mobile network performance league of 16 urban areas in the UK – only Birmingham did worse overall.

The West Midlands' Coventry came top in RootMetrics' biannual survey of cities and major towns, which took into account call and text performance, as well as data speeds. Leicester, in the East Midlands, came in a very narrow second.

It's lousy data speeds wot sunk the Big Smoke.

While England's capital was ranked fifth for text messaging performance (Manchester first), it came 13th out of 16 for call quality (Manchester first, Coventry second), bottom for data performance (Leicester first) and 12th for reliability (Coventry first).

Coventry displaces Belfast, which was rated as having the best all round network performance last September.

RootMetrics noted strong improvements in the Leeds-Bradford Area, saying: "The market narrowly missed the top 3 in two categories (network speed and data) and ranked 6th or better in all six categories."

By contrast, Edinburgh's relative performance declined.

IHS Markit's RootMetrics used Galaxy phones to assess the territory, taking into account static, walking and driving performance. Some other surveys merely measure data speeds.

Last week, Britain's biggest 5G boffin noted the technology was being rushed in, even though it wasn't really ready, to answer capacity constraints on 4G networks. ®